The Fat Lady Sings
by Will Kemp
Others, but stewards of their excellence ...
For sweetest things turne sowrest by their deedes,
Roses that fester, smell far worse than weeds.
—Shakespeare, Sonnet 94
She stalks those rebels through her nowhere air,
Revellers dancing wild and free! — who dare
To have no need of her! — and worse, don’t care!
How sad to see Florinda’s cute-styled face
She pictures as a ten-year-old’s, now swell
Into a vain, lugubrious, primal yell —
A tricoteuse’s ululating wail —
Such as (she dreams in prurient detail)
Might turn some Oxford (male) professor pale.
She hurls her righteous angst forth to erase
All she can never own: frivolity,
Light-hearted friendship, laughter (non-PC,
Non-doctrinaire), bright cameraderie,
Collaboration; most of all, the male.
Her cute-child’s face begins to recompose
As pampered matron-bigot’s, adipose —
No fresh-bloomed bud, nor cankered, blowsy rose,
But rampantly gargantuan, gross weed
Dismally yodelling vast imperious need.
With seismic wobbles of her broad-beamed bum
She yawns her gullet wide — the song-sobs come:
It’s over for them! the Fat Lady grandly sings,
Friendships, free spirits and unconquered kings!
Snapped back behind her vizor of faux-child,
She glares out at the distant, heedless wild.
